Tampa mom guilty of killing 2 teens

Tampa mom guilty of killing 2 teens

TAMPA, Fla.

Florida jurors on Thursday rejected the insanity plea of a former military linguist and longtime Army officer’s wife, convicting the 53-year-old of first-degree murder for shooting and killing her 13-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter more than three years ago while her husband was deployed.

Julie Schenecker, dressed in a gray suit with a button-down pink shirt, wiped her nose and eyes, then the bailiffs handcuffed her as the verdict was read after just more than an hour of deliberations. She started to cry. She was sentenced soon after to two life terms, fingerprinted and led away to prison.

Schenecker killed her daughter, Calyx, and son, Beau, in January 2011, while her now ex-Army officer husband, Col. Parker Schenecker, was on a 10-day deployment to the Middle East.

Schenecker told the judge she takes responsibility for what she’s done.

US: Boko Haram now a top priority

WASHINGTON

The State Department acknowledged Thursday it could have acted sooner to designate Nigeria’s Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization, even though the Nigerian government and many Africa experts opposed the move when it was first considered two years ago.

The acknowledgment — accompanied by a caveat that it is impossible to say if an earlier designation would have had a significant impact on the group — came amid Republican criticism of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decision not to take the step in 2012. And it was made as senior U.S. officials declared to Congress that freeing the schoolgirls abducted by the radical Islamist group last month has become one of the Obama administration’s top priorities.

Feds OK controls on health costs

WASHINGTON

The Obama administration has given the go-ahead for insurers and employers to use a new cost-control strategy that puts a hard dollar limit on what health plans pay for some expensive procedures, such as knee and hip replacements.

Some experts worry that such a move would surprise patients who pick more-expensive hospitals. The cost difference would leave them with big medical bills that they’d have to pay themselves.

10K gallons of oil spill on LA street

LOS ANGELES

A geyser of oil sprayed onto buildings and puddled in knee-high pools of crude in Los Angeles streets after a valve on a high-pressure pipeline failed Thursday.

About 10,000 gallons of oil spewed 20 feet high over approximately half a mile of the industrial area of Atwater Village about 12:15 a.m., Fire Capt. Jaime Moore said.

Four commercial businesses near the border of Glendale were affected, as well as a strip club that was evacuated after oil came through air vents. The parking lot was closed, and patrons and employees were forced to leave behind their crude-coated cars.

Group: Bomb kills 43 in northern Syria

BEIRUT

A massive car bomb ripped through a crowded garage Thursday near a rebel-held border crossing between Syria and Turkey, killing at least 43 people in an area that has seen fierce fighting between rival rebel groups, an anti-government activist group said.

The attack came as President Bashar Assad’s forces have seized the momentum of the country’s 3-year-old civil war ahead of presidential elections scheduled for June 3.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blast killed 43 people and wounded more than 80.

Associated Press